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The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

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Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#251

Post by LtdJorge »

dmurray wrote: post #167
seabass-labrax wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to know where your towers were. Do you know if they still exist? Were your microwave antennae co-located on other operators' towers (e.g. those for VHF radio), or did your company have towers all to itself?

Without going into anything confidential - we had some of our own hardware, but generally rented capacity from firms like [0]. Some towers were custom built for HFT, some were shared with other types of users. A famous blog post investigating some of the towers as an outsider, at [1], will be of interest to you. If you want to guess where they are, get a globe, find the datacentres where electronic exchanges operate…

Is the microwave setup quicker than going through fiber nowadays? I only mean in terms of latency.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#252

Post by swores »

Sharlin wrote: post #156
swores wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not at all knowledgable about this, but: is it feasible (and if so, hard?) or impossible to have some sort of live reporting from the turbines about the speed/position of their blades that connects to the radar system allowing it to ignore what it knows to be turbine noise/shadow and therefore be able to have turbines there and still get good radar?

Well, you can't just ignore a radar shadow or noise. Just like GP's point-to-point microwave link couldn't just "ignore" the crane. You can't make a bad Wi-fi connection faster by just telling your computer to ignore the wall between you and the hot spot. A wind turbine is a solid obstacle that conceals stuff behind it, and even if a single turbine might not be a big deal, most commonly someone interested in harnessi…

My (probably ignorant) thinking was that if there weren't propellers, just stalks, they could be arranged in a pattern that radar setups at multiple locations could see through gaps and between them have no dark spaces caused by the towers. Leaving the problem that the blades essentially block out an entire circle, but if the radar software knows the position of every turbine's blades (by a combination of turbines reporting location/speed/acceleration of blades in real time and maybe modelling so the radar system can know in time at least fairly if not very accurately where all blades are in a field of them) then when a radar bounces of one it can say "that doesn't count as a hit" leaving only non-turbine objects showing up in the UI that the radar setup outputs?

Is it that radar can't ping / receive at a high enough frequency to distinguish the difference between "this fraction of a ms the blade was at that location so we don't care about the radar hitting something, but the next fraction of a ms the blade had moved and we still got a ping from just behind it so there's something there"? Or some other problem with the idea?

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#253

Post by swores »

obi1kenobi wrote: post #149
smcl wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you ignored the turbines themselves, there would still be a "shadow" behind the turbines though I think? Which means you'd have a blind spot every now and then (when the wind is blowing and the turbines are active) which could be exploited by an enemy

Even if you are looking at the turbines "edge-on," there's probably going to be a noticeable Doppler return as well. Plastic drones with plastic propellers are still visible on radar because the tiny propellers spin super fast, so they light up like a Christmas tree on Doppler radar because the approaching vs receding velocities of the blades are so different.

Any chance you can explain to this idiot (me) the flaw in my thinking? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903084

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#254

Post by rawbot »

ozim wrote: post #249
drb999 wrote: post #55

Reminds me of an extremely similar case with a long distance microwave link at a mobile telecom provider in Australia that I worked for. They relied quite heavily on microwave link chains and this particular one was in northern Queensland where fixed lines were hard to find and no local engineers were locally present/aware of the changing environment. Every week day + Saturday, from 7-3 the link would keep cutting ou…

Love that story. For me it reminds me most debugging I see at work. People coming up with theories and doing some magic incantations on the interface. Instead of reading the log files or reading error description which makes usually error and fix obvious in 10 seconds.

Reading log files with really obscure error messages might as well be reading a magical grimoire. Especially when the solution turned out to have nothing to do with the error message.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#255

Post by Animats »

thekevan wrote: post #176

This is a bit ridiculous. How can you know that you have a ling of sight element to you network and not check that as the very first thing when you hear about rain effecting the wifi?

I had that feeling, too, especially when the author talks about climbing up to the endpoint to check the equipment. He knew it was a line of sight microwave link, so the first thing to check is obstruction or reflection by things that can move a little. I was thinking that it might only work when someone had a big flat-sided truck or RV in the right place to reflect the signal around something.

I've had trouble with tree growth in other contexts. A tree once slowly grew tall enough to break the neutral wire on the drop from the power pole to the house. This put overvoltages on some 110V circuits. Computers were fine. Washing machine emitted a burning smell. More recently, tree growth broke a fiber line coming into my house. AT&T lineman came out and restrung fiber for three poles (I'm a ways back from the main road). He saw me running a desktop computer, slowly, tethered to a phone, and once fiber was reconnected, said "Now you're back in 2023".

(Now to get rid of the dead cable. I have dead DirectTV coax, dead cable TV coax from whoever was before Comcast, and dead Pacific Bell copper, all abandoned in place and some of it sagging.)

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#257

Post by bpye »

re wrote: post #121
ColinWright wrote: post #53

Another classic: Can log in while sitting down, can't log in when standing up. I need to find the reference ... Edit: OK, here's one version: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

Based on the title, I expected this to somehow be related to "Office chair turns off monitors" (it wasn't, but that is also a good one). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004 [Edit: I see this one has also been mentioned a few times already in the thread]

I had experienced this one and felt like I was going mad, and then I guess the humidity changed and I gave up/stopped thinking about it. It wasn't until a couple years later I saw a post here about the gas cylinders causing monitors to blank.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#258

Post by redbell »

> Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club: an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics.

Honestly, reading "April 1st!", I was expecting this to be one of April's fools but it turned out to be a true and amusing story.

The author was lucky to solve a technical problem in a non-technical way, unlike me!

A decade ago, I had a weird Internet connection issue. The upload speed suddenly dropped to near zero kb/s while the download was alright. I contacted my ISP, and for weeks, they were unable to figure out what was going wrong. I reached out to my neighbor and offered him to pay his Internet bill in exchange for sharing his Wi-Fi with me until my ISP solves my problem, and he kindly agreed. After about three months, my ISP's technical staff was still unable to fix the issue. I gave up, and guess what I did to get around this?! I just moved away to another distant home.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#259

Post by Jean-Philipe »

Reminds me of that time when my desktop computer wouldn't turn on if the printer's USB was plugged in to the wrong kind of port. Took me some time to figure that one out.

Or that other time, when my mom's phone started crashing all of a sudden. Until we discovered, that it was caused by her new ID card in the folding phone case touching the back of the phone.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#260

Post by Animats »

nate wrote: post #56

While we're on the subject: I still can't solve this and thought you'd either laugh or you are the only people who know what I'm going through :) I have some fancy Asus Mesh wifi routers at home. I sit next to the cable modem and one mesh endpoint. My wife sits upstairs. there's an upstairs mesh endpoint but I think neither of us are usually connected to it (mostly serves to extend our connection to go to yard). But…

Definitely people can absorb enough RF to block WiFi.

I hit this in a hotel, back when I was doing steampunk conventions. Antique Teletype machines put into brass and glass cases, getting text messages over the Internet. (Early versions of this used Google Voice to read SMS; later versions used Twilio.) The hotel lobby had WiFi, but the function room we were in did not. I'd tested in advance, and was able to get a good WiFi connection with the room empty. But once it filled up with people, we couldn't get through. Had to run out to Fry's and buy a WiFi booster.

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